On Hard Facts and Misleading Data

APPENDIX A On Hard Facts and Misleading Data In an interview with Horace Freeland Judson (1979:113-114), on September 10, 1972, Francis Crick said, in part, that "people don't realize that not only can data be wrong in science, it can be misleading. There isn't such a thing as a hard fact when you're trying to discover something. It's only afterwards that the facts become hard." Crick was, of course, talking about constituting an accurate model for DNA: You must remember, we were trying to solve it with the fewest possible assump hons. .. There's a perfectly sound reason-it isn't just a matter of aesthetics or because we thought it was a nice game-why you should use the minimum of experi mental data .... The point is that evidence can be unreliable, and therefore you should use as little of it as you can. And when we confront problems today, we're 10 exactly the same situation. Psychologists of the breed Desmond calls "pongists," those, namely, who attempted to inculcate carefully selected specimens of four species of African and Asian apes with variously coded symbol systems-chiefly during the last decade-have tended to ignore this sensible monition and others like it, the reasons for which have, however, been well appreciated by their more circumspect confreres. Wachtel (1980:407), for example, re cently reiterated some of the glaring limitations of the experimental method in the behav ioral sciences: he explained that such strictures, "fostered both by the prevailing ideology in the field and by the exigencies of the grant process ... " as well as by "subtle biasing factors in experiments, long overlooked or minimized by experimenters ... " not merely stressed the confirmation of hypotheses, but also created problems of a substantive nature, "yielding misleading findings and one-sided conceptualizations." The enigma Desmond chose to tackle in his book can, in the end, be traced back to the existence of a dramatic but, as yet, unbridged gap between two seemingly discrepant sets of facts, which he outlines, in his vivid and readable style, in a brief opening chapter. A review of The Ape's Reflexion (979) by Adrian J. Desmond. Reprinted from Reviews in Anthropology, Vol. 8 (1981). 189 190 APPENDIX A Taking Pan troglodytes as the paradigmatic ape species, we have come to know, in increasing detail, that, on the one hand, the fine structure and genetic organization of the chromosomes of man and chimpanzee are arrestingly alike-many human pairs appear to be identical to a corresponding chimpanzee pair, or almost so, and such differences as are detectable are of arrangement rather than substance. The view that men and chimpanzees are closely related on the chromosomal level thus stands corroborated. Moreover, earlier studies have shown that nearly 99 percent of our DNA matches that of chimpanzees. These substratal facts notwithstanding, something drastic intervenes in the course of information transfer between genotype and phenotype, a differential transition most re cently found intractable by Yunis et al. (1980: 1148): "Such a remarkable degree of similarity makes difficult a precise explanation of the large biological differences between two closely related species." The underlying impediment was recognized, in general, by Jacob and Monod twenty years ago: tissue cells do not express, all the time, all the potentialities inherent in the totality of their genes-presumably because the particular survival requirements of every species of organism are different from those of every other. As they had observed (1960:354): "According to the strictly structural concept, the genome is considered as a mosaic of independent molecular blue-prints for the building of individual cellular constituents. In the execution of these plans, however, coordination is evidently of absolute survival value." In a previous paper (Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981), we have already drawn attention to the evident fact that adult apes conspicuously differ in phenotype from grown-up people and that the behavior patterns displayed by the two-notably in respect to the semiotic faculty-are separated by a profound chasm at the bottom of which must lie, as Gould (1980:45) suggested, the repressive regulation of the activity of our respective structural genes, specifically as to their timing (i.e., fetal growth rates) during the development of the central nervous system: "Our substantial overt differences in form and behavior are probably for the most part results of relatively minor genetic changes that have slowed down developmental rates in humans, leaving us, as adults, strikingly similar in many ways to the juvenile stages of other primates." To which Gould adds (ibid.) that "we have located (perhaps properly) human uniqueness in language and abstract conceptualization, and have regarded cerebral asymmetry and some aspects of cerebral localization as its physical sign-and, presumably, as a direct adapta tion in humans 'for' these traits." Whether apes display a similar asymmetry, as Gould claims (on limited evidence), or whether this is confined to the Sylvian fissure and coupled to functional dominance rather than subserving some function related to lan guage, is an open question (cf. the remarks of Geschwind, in Caplan 1980:310-311), and really is beside the point. The burden of Desmond's book is to inquire whether man is unique or not, with specific regard to language. His conclusion falters: "Man is no longer the measure of Creation," he adjudges in the last sentence of his work (p. 244), in a portentous para phrase of Plato's Protagoras of Abdera, which was always an untenably unbiological position of subjective idealism against which I took a firm stance in the opening pages of a recent book of my own (Sebeok 1979:1-2,26). It by no means follows, however, that faculties resembling the human language capacity have been found in any other primate or, indeed, any other organism whatsoever. There are several weighty reasons for this attitude of skepticism; we have reviewed many of them in successively more detailed critiques (Sebeok I 979,Chapter 5; Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok 1980,Chapter I; Sebeok HARD FACTS AND MISLEADING DATA 191 1981, chapter 8; Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1979 and 1981), none of which have been, so far, gainsaid in print. These arguments stem from a careful review of all published data by the "pongists," including a heedful scrutiny of still and motion pictures, supple mented by other sources of reliable information. Still another set of reasons derives from linguistic theory, according to which the discovery of language in other species "would constitute a kind of biological miracle" (Chomsky 1980:239). No such miracle has been revealed to have occurred. On the contrary, several prominent psychologists have now retracted their faith in the probability of achieving so wondrous an event in a reasonable timespan, if ever (representative quotations from Premack, Rumbaugh. and Terrace each dated 1979, hence all presumably published after Desmond's manuscript was locked into type-are assembled and may conveniently be read in juxtaposition in our Postscript to Umiker-Sebeok and Sebeok 1981). Ofthe majorfigures in the "chuman nature" field (Reynolds 1980:865), only the pioneering Gardners and several of their equally sanguine epigones continue to follow their so far elusive (and fearfully expensive) gleam. An irritating red herring some "pongists" and their partisans keep bringing up in their increasingly desperate debates, one which is unfortunately echoed by Desmond, is that "there exists no consensus on how exactly to define language in man" (p. 22). I deal with this false trail in Appendix II of Sebeok 1981, but the particulars are cogently and authoritatively set forth, along five different dimensions of inquiry, by, for example, Chomsky (1980, Chapter 6). One does not need very much linguistic sophistication to grasp these details, for the fundamental differences between human language and the systems taught to apes are, one can but concur with Chomsky, "clear at the most elementary level" (ibid. 239). Few linguists would disagree that the cleavage can be studied either functionally or structurally, or both, that its physical basis, though it may not be a novel attribute of Homo sapiens, is nevertheless at least quantitatively distant, and that there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic alterities of great consequence between man and the other species. To this, I would like to add-although the matter is far too complex to be pursued, even cursorily, in this review-that much of the concep tual confusion comes about from considering language as primarily a communicative tool (cf. ibid. 229-230). In fact, language must have evolved as an extraordinarily (in fact, uniquely) supple instrument for modeling man's Umwelt in the mind (Innenwelt), this malleability being a direct consequence of the fact that, in the manner of a tinker toy, sentences have the capability of being decomposed and reconstituted in multifarious novel ways (i.e., of undergoing syntactic transformation). (This human double activity of analysis and reconstitution has been most effectively described by Bronowski [in Sebeok 1975c:2539-2559]). But, as Terrace told Desmond (and published the specifics else where), his chimpanzee, Nim, and others-not only of these species, but of gorillas too whose reported performances he has painstakingly analyzed, exhibited "woefully little idea of the syntactic power of sentence structure" (p. 53). If the theory of the evolution of language to which I allude is at all on the right track, it follows that the primary modeling function acquired a secondary communicative function-usually by means of speech only much later; this is why I join Geschwind (in Caplan 1980:313) in suspecting "that the forerunners of language were functions whose social advantages were secondary but conferred an advantage for survival. I think it possible," he continues, "that the chim panzee may have dominance for something that is not obviously related to what we now know as language." 192 APPENDIX A Desmond ascribes "strategic importance" to lying in apes (pp.

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